This remarkable composer and guitarist, who'd played her instrument since she was 11 years old, was studying biology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, when she took a class taught by the great multi-instrumentalist and composer Anthony Braxton (oft-featured here, though not as often as wished) and decided to change her career course.
Like her mentor, Halvorson writes and plays in a dizzying array of styles even if she, like Braxton, is generally considered a jazz musician. She has a clear tone, a clean sound and is a masterful soloist and sensitive accompanist to the wide variety of players with which she associates, but she can also unleash wild and unorthodox solos that are dazzling.
As importantly, she is a very interesting writer with wide latitude for the improvisation that makes jazz such a great musical form, though she brings rock, flamenco and other genres into her mind-bending works. Notably, Halvorson recently commented that she had a tendency in the past to overwrite in her compositions, but 2016's Away With You, released on Firehouse 12 Records, which has featured Braxton and many other great musicians (Tyshawn Sorey, Myra Melford, and co-founder Taylor Ho Bynum) on its roster.
With four horns (alto and tenor sax, trumpet and trombone), a pedal steel guitar and bass and drums, Halvorson creates a diverse palette of sound in the eight pieces on the recording. Like Braxton and another great composer/musician Henry Threadgill, she deftly orchestrates for the several instruments in ways that are richly creative, sometimes spiky, often contemplative and always interesting with an unerring eye for experiment.
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